Beyond Outrage: What Has Gone Wrong with Our Economy and Our Democracy, and How to Fix Them

Robert B. Reich urges Americans to get beyond mere outrage about the nation’s increasingly concentrated wealth and corrupt politics in order to mobilize and to take back our economy and democracy. Americans can’t rely only on getting good people elected, Reich argues, because nothing positive happens in Washington unless good people outside Washington are organized to help make those things happen after the election. But in order to be effectively mobilized, we need to see the big picture.

Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In

When Bernie Sanders began his race for the presidency, it was considered by the political establishment and the media to be a "fringe" campaign, something not to be taken seriously. After all, he was just an independent senator from a small state with little name recognition. His campaign had no money, no political organization, and it was taking on the entire Democratic Party establishment. By the time Sanders' campaign came to a close, however, it was clear that the pundits had gotten it wrong.

American Amnesia: How the War on Government Led Us to Forget What Made America Rich

Like every other prospering democracy, the United States developed a mixed economy that channeled the spirit of capitalism into strong growth and healthy social development. In this bargain, government and business were as much partners as rivals. Public investments in education, science, transportation, and technology laid the foundation for broadly based prosperity.

Joseph M. Hidalgo says:"Very insightful! Technical at first but a must read for today's political environment!!"

Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?

It is a widespread belief among liberals that if only Democrats can continue to dominate national elections, if only those awful Republicans are beaten into submission, the country will be on the right course. But this is to fundamentally misunderstand the modern Democratic Party. Drawing on years of research and first-hand reporting, Frank points out that the Democrats have done little to advance traditional liberal goals: expanding opportunity, fighting for social justice, and ensuring that workers get a fair deal.

Rewriting the Rules of the American Economy: An Agenda for Growth and Shared Prosperity

The United States bills itself as the land of opportunity, a place where anyone can achieve success and a better life through hard work and determination. But the facts tell a different story - the US today lags behind most other developed nations in measures of inequality and economic mobility. For decades, wages have stagnated for the majority of workers while economic gains have disproportionately gone to the top one percent.

Reason: Why Liberals Will Win the Battle for America

From Robert B. Reich, passionate believer in American democracy and public servant, Reason is a guide to confronting and derailing what he sees as the mounting threat to American liberty, prosperity, and security posed by the radical conservatives, Radcons as he calls them.

Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right

Why is America living in an age of profound economic inequality? Why, despite the desperate need to address climate change, have even modest environmental efforts been defeated again and again? Why have protections for employees been decimated? Why do hedge-fund billionaires pay a far lower tax rate than middle-class workers? The conventional answer is that a popular uprising against "big government" led to the rise of a broad-based conservative movement.

Who Rules the World?

In an incisive, thorough analysis of the current international situation, Noam Chomsky argues that the United States, through its military-first policies and its unstinting devotion to maintaining a world-spanning empire, is both risking catastrophe and wrecking the global commons.

Jen says:"Makes you realize those who scream conspiracy are closer to the truth than we would hope!"

White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America

In White Trash, Nancy Isenberg upends assumptions about America's supposedly class-free society. Poor whites were central to the rise of the Republican Party in the early 19th century, and the Civil War itself was fought over class issues nearly as much as it was fought over slavery. Reconstruction pitted poor white trash against newly freed slaves, which factored in the rise of eugenics. These poor were at the heart of New Deal reforms and LBJ's Great Society; they haunt us in reality TV shows like Here Comes Honey Boo Boo and Duck Dynasty.

Lies, Incorporated: The World of Post-Truth Politics

In today's post-truth political landscape, there is a carefully concealed but ever-growing industry of organized misinformation that exists to create and disseminate lies in the service of political agendas. Ari Rabin-Havt and Media Matters for America present a revelatory history of this industry - which they've dubbed Lies, Incorporated - and show how it has crippled legislative progress on issues including tobacco regulation, public health care, climate change, gun control, immigration, abortion, and same-sex marriage.

Ratf**ked: The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America's Democracy

With Barack Obama's historic election in 2008, pundits proclaimed the Republicans as dead as the Whigs of yesteryear. Yet even as Democrats swooned, a small cadre of Republican operatives, including Karl Rove, Ed Gillespie, and Chris Jankowski, began plotting their comeback with a simple yet ingenious plan. These men had devised a way to take a tradition of dirty tricks - known to political insiders as "ratf**king" - to a whole new unprecedented level.

Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business

Eight years on from the biggest market meltdown since the Great Depression, the key lessons of the crisis of 2008 still remain unlearned - and our financial system is just as vulnerable as ever. Many of us know that our government failed to fix the banking system after the subprime mortgage crisis. But what few of us realize is how the misguided financial practices and philosophies that nearly toppled the global financial system have come to infiltrate all American businesses, putting us on a collision course with another cataclysmic meltdown.

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis

Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis - that of white working-class Americans. The decline of this group, a demographic of our country that has been slowly disintegrating over 40 years, has been reported on with growing frequency and alarm but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hung around your neck.

The Great Divide: Unequal Societies and What We Can Do About Them

In The Great Divide, Joseph E. Stiglitz expands on the diagnosis he offered in his best-selling book The Price of Inequality and suggests ways to counter America's growing problem. With his signature blend of clarity and passion, Stiglitz argues that inequality is a choice - the cumulative result of unjust policies and misguided priorities.

The top 1 percent of Americans control 40 percent of the nation's wealth. And, as Joseph E. Stiglitz explains, while those at the top enjoy the best health care, education, and benefits of wealth, they fail to realize that "their fate is bound up with how the other 99 percent live." Stiglitz draws on his deep understanding of economics to show that growing inequality is not inevitable. He examines our current state, then teases out its implications for democracy, for monetary and budgetary policy, and for globalization. He closes with a plan for a more just and prosperous future.

Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

In his most ambitious work to date, Thomas L. Friedman shows that we have entered an age of dizzying acceleration - and explains how to live in it. Due to an exponential increase in computing power, climbers atop Mount Everest enjoy excellent cell phone service, and self-driving cars are taking to the roads. A parallel explosion of economic interdependency has created new riches as well as spiraling debt burdens.

Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress - and a Plan to Stop It

In an era of ballooning corporate campaign expenditures, unleashed by the Supreme Court in Citizens United, trust in our government is at an all time low. More than ever before, Americans believe that money buys results in Congress - and that our Republic has been lost.Using examples that resonate as powerfully on the Right as on the Left, Republic, Lost not only makes clear how the economy of influence defeats the will of the people, but offers cogent strategies to correct our course....

Why the Right Went Wrong: Conservatism from Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond

Why the Right Went Wrong offers a historical view of the right since the 1960s. Its core contention is that American conservatism and the Republican Party took a wrong turn when they adopted Barry Goldwater's worldview during and after the 1964 campaign. Since 1968, no conservative administration could live up to the rhetoric rooted in the Goldwater movement that began to reshape American politics 50 years ago.

We're Still Right, They're Still Wrong: The Democrats' Case for 2016

James Carville is the best-known and most-loved political consultant in American history. He is also a speaker, a talk-show host, an actor, and an author with six New York Times best sellers to his credit. Part of a large Southern family, he grew up without a television and loved to listen to the stories his mama told. Mr. Carville lives with his wife, Mary Matalin, and their two daughters in New Orleans.

Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life

Since the 1970s, and notwithstanding three recessions, the U.S. economy has soared. American capitalism has been a triumph, and it has spread throughout the world. At the same time, argues the former U.S. secretary of labor, Robert B. Reich, the effectiveness of democracy in America has declined. It has grown less responsive to the citizenry, and people are feeling more and more helpless as a result.

Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future

The author of 12 acclaimed books, Robert B. Reich is a Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and has served in three national administrations. While many blamed Wall Street for the financial meltdown, Aftershock points a finger at a national economy in which wealth is increasingly concentrated at the top - and where a grasping middle class simply does not have the resources to remain viable.

Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin's Snuff Box to Citizens United

For two centuries, the Framers' ideas about political corruption flourished in the courts, even in the absence of clear rules governing voters, civil officers, and elected officials. In the 1970s, the U.S. Supreme Court began to narrow the definition of corruption, and the meaning has since changed dramatically. No case makes that clearer than Citizens United.

White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide

As Ferguson, Missouri, erupted in August 2014, and media commentators across the ideological spectrum referred to the angry response of African Americans as 'black rage', historian Carol Anderson wrote a remarkable op-ed in the Washington Post showing that this was, instead, 'white rage at work. With so much attention on the flames,' she wrote, 'everyone had ignored the kindling.'

The Daily Show (the AudioBook): An Oral History as Told by Jon Stewart, the Correspondents, Staff and Guests

This oral history takes the listener behind the curtain for all the show's highlights, from its origins as Comedy Central's underdog late-night program hosted by Craig Kilborn to Jon Stewart's long reign to Trevor Noah's succession, rising from a scrappy jester in the 24-hour political news cycle to become part of the beating heart of politics - a trusted source for not only comedy but also commentary, with a reputation for calling bullshit and an ability to effect real change in the world.

Publisher's Summary

In Saving Capitalism, Robert Reich reveals the entrenched cycles of power and influence that have damaged American capitalism, perpetuating a new oligarchy in which the 1 percent get ever richer and the rest - middle and working class alike - lose ever more economic agency, making for the greatest income inequality and wealth disparity since World War II. In brilliantly provocative detail, he shows how our misguided veneration of the "free market" has led us here and offers an empowering call to civic action as well as specific ideas for reform. A former White House advisor, talk show fixture, lecturer, and essayist and the star of last year's acclaimed documentary Inequality for All, Robert Reich is a beloved ambassador of progressive economics and a voice of reason in a media climate of fear mongering and finger pointing.

Normally, I'm not especially interested in economics. But I was fascinated with Robert Reich's explanation of how the middle class’s buying power and political influence have been transferred to the hands of the wealthiest with the full complicity of politicians on both sides of the spectrum.

I am certain RR is right when he suggests that if more of us understood what is actually happening, we’d cease the right vs. left debate --which miss the point-- and focus on how the world economy’s gone out of whack and on how to accommodate the new realities caused by the relocation of manufacturing jobs and the ability of successful tech companies to make crazy money with relatively few employees.

I also believe he’s right in suggesting those of us in what remains of the middle class are not lazy or useless, as we may have started to believe. In fact, we’re more productive than our parents were. We are just being paid less than our parents, counter-intuitively. The wealth we help generate is no longer being shared with us in an equitable manner. An ever-increasing share is redirected to the new aristocracy.

Do yourself and your kids a favour and read this book. You’ll be shocked at what you’ll learn but glad you did.

Inequality has been Mr. Reich's favorite topic for a while. In this book the author employs years, if not decades, of research to describe the forces governing and dictating the future of America. He proposes a number of alternatives to correct the course of wealth distribution and does a good job of handling common objections to his proposals. This is a much more mature book, in my view, as compared to Supercapitalism, for example. His ideas are clearer and more organized. It also helps to have the author narrating his own book, to give the right intonation amd emphasis where needed. I definitely recommend this audiobook to people interested in forming a broader understanding of distribution of wealth and its impact in society.

Reich does a great job connecting the dots between wealth and resulting political power used to set the market rules and concentrate the wealth. He also provides useful historical background and comparisons with modern politics. Particularly curious was his review of his own predictions 25 years ago on overall labor allocation.

I suspect many who perceive Reich as overly biased left won't make the time to read this latest work which Is unfortunate. The review of macro economic and political trends is quite fascinating and Reich builds a plausible narrative which connects the far left and far right on shared dissatisfaction of the status quo.

We all realize that something has gone very wrong in America, but we can't seem to figure out what it is. Reich concisely explains why this is (because we're easily distracted by largely irrelevant claims), what happened (while we were arguing over markets versus government intervention, the fundamental rules of the market were rewritten in ways that make us worse off), and what we might do about it (reinvigorate countervailing power that can offset the influence of concentrated wealth).

Which character – as performed by Robert B. Reich – was your favorite?

"Saving Capitalism" is a nonfiction book, so it doesn't have characters for the most part, but Reich reads with excellent inflection and enunciation, and he incorporates different voice styles when quoting historical figures. The result is a very engaging vocal rendering of a very engaging book.

Maybe I haven't been reading the right books because I have to say this book is one of the best books I have read recently, not only does Robert give us the details on how capitalism is flawed for the average American. But He also dedicates a chapter on possible solutions to fix the problem. Lots of new knowledge and easy to comprehend. I have a few things in mind that came from this book that I will further research. Five stars.

The book is about the "Free Market" and how it is not a natural "free" thing but a set of rules shaped by our legislators who have largely been influenced by large corporations, Wall Street, and wealthy individuals. It is not a polemic. Reich is excellent as the narrator.

I hope it gets wide readership. I agree with Reich that the current trend in having a government of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich may change, but it sure takes the public a long time to catch on. We need a movement.

Exceptionally well performed. A true eye opener that takes one through, not only what the current problems are and what the possible solutions would be, but what can be done to improve the status quo in any capitalist economy.

This book delineates very clearly the deficiencies to our current political economy and begs the question whether we will do what is necessary to fix it. Mr. Reich does this without asking whether it is possible.l- he instead hakes it resoundingly clear that it is not only possible, but necessary.